Humans struggle to maintain a healthy diet for several reasons, and an unhealthy diet can lead to an unsatisfactory lifestyle or medical conditions. Some reasons for this struggle are food perishability, high labor cost associated with preparing food, lack of portable temperature-controlled storage, dietary habits, lifestyles, accessibility to healthy food, and difficulty to prepare food quickly and locally.
To mitigate an unhealthy diet, many consumers and even restaurants use computerized inventory systems for storing fresh and healthy food such as fruit or vegetables for a salad. Computerized inventory systems include sensors for detecting the presence of inventory items, and an inventory processor for restocking of those items when inventory levels fall below a threshold. The computerized inventory systems help people eat healthy food because they increase the availability of fresh food and reduce resources required to maintain the inventory.
However, even with these computerized inventory systems, it is difficult to eat healthy because healthy food perishes quickly. For example, ingredients for a healthy organic salad may only last a few days or less inside of a refrigerator, and parts of the ingredients (e.g., avocados) can perish before other ingredients (e.g., lettuce). Thus, a consumer or business owner needs to frequently monitor the health of perishable goods. Even more, a consumer or business owner may need to remove some ingredients and leave others (e.g., remove avocados and keep the lettuce), which requires time and resources.
Accordingly, a need exists for technology that overcomes these problems and provides additional benefits.